Transform Options
You may wish to administer the instrument "as is" online, using Mind Garden's Transform™ system. This is very easy and will save you a great deal of time. Each license for Transform™ Survey Hosting provides access to our Transform™ system and data download with raw scale scores by respondent.
More about Mind Garden's Transform system
Transform is a human assessment system that creates a unique identity for your participants. This means you can do self-assessment and assessment of the same person over time or across many instruments. Some instruments are multi-rater where the person can assess themselves and others can rate them. A participant can even rate their social environment. Since each person has an identity, all data you collect from or about a person stays linked to that person. You may even want to enter external criterion data or collect demographics from them.
How to use Transform
First, purchase Transform™ Survey Hosting for the number of participants in your study.
Survey Hosting Pricing for Data + Scoring: You will see that the pricing structure for multi-rater assessments is very different from that of self-assessments. For self-assessments we charge for each survey participant, whereas with multi-rater assessments we charge for participant subjects but not for raters. Multi-rater assessments start with a set-up fee and a small amount is added for each additional leader/participant.
Using Transform vs. other online survey websites
Option #1 Mind Garden's Transform Survey Hosting
- Example: $525 for 300 participants (the same price as Option #2);
- No re-typing, no formatting needed — we provide raw scale scores by participant.
- Transform™ is a huge timesaver if you don't want to do your own scoring or create a survey from scratch.
- Most of our instruments are self-assessments rather than multi-rater (360) assessments, however Transform handles both types with ease.
Option #2 Other Online Survey websites
- There may be a monthly fee for surveys depending on quantity.
- You will need to purchase a pdf license to administer from Mind Garden, Example: $525 for 300 participants.
- Requires re-typing, formatting the survey, and you score the data.
- Note that most online survey websites cannot deal easily with multi-rater input as this requires an advanced database structure.
Methods for administering self-only (or rater-only) surveys
The survey may be administered in several ways. The methods vary in the amount of effort required by the respondent to enter or participate in the survey, and in the amount of control you as a survey administrator have over the quality and characteristics of those responding.
Confidentiality: It is important to know that Mind Garden will not sell, distribute, or otherwise use the email addresses of survey participants (See our Privacy Policy for more information).
Email-specific Invitations
With this method of administration, you import email addresses (and names or unique identifiers) into Transform. After clicking Import and then OK, Transform sends an email directly to the participant (you have the option of adding text to the Mind Garden email). The participant clicks on the invitation link and is taken to a login page, where they enter their email address and create a password. They go directly into the survey from the login screen.
- Advantage: This option gives you as survey administrator the most control over who responds to your survey.
- Disadvantage: Requires login to take the survey, which many respondents do not like to do.
- Advantage: We can turn on an option for you to "send to all Pending (incomplete) participants and raters" a reminder with the click of a button. This is a time saver for you. Caution: overuse of this feature may cause potential respondents to become irritable.
Link Method
With this method of administering a survey, you will use your own email program to send the survey invitations. You import participant email addresses (and/or names) into Transform. The system will not send invitations. The participant will receive an invitation email from you and will click on a link to a login page. They will login, set a password, and go directly into the survey.
- Advantage: You have control over who takes your survey (by email identity), and the system will not let the same email address enter the survey more than once.
- Disadvantage: You cannot "send to all Pending (incomplete) participants and raters" a reminder with the click of a button because the invitations are sent from your email program.
Special Key Link Method
With this method of administering a survey, we provide a link to your campaign that you may distribute. When a participant clicks on the special key link they go to a login page, provide an email address, create a password, and can access the survey.
You don't need to import names and email addresses into the campaign because each participant provides this information at login. Contact us to restrict your special key link for use only with certain email address domains.
This method writes the participant email address into the data file (you can request suppression of email addresses if desired, and if a report is generated no name will appear in the report).
- Advantage: Personal reports can be generated because an email identity exists for each participant.
- Advantage: Special key link can be restricted for use only with certain email address domains – contact us to enable this feature.
- Disadvantage: If an unrestricted link becomes available via internet search, anyone can take your survey and use the licenses you purchased.
- Disadvantage: You may run out of licenses and participants will be blocked from entering and responding to the survey.
The appearance of the key link is as follows: transform.mindgarden.com/login/key/xxxxxx where "xxxxxx" is the campaign ID. Note that this link does not automatically appear on the customer's page and MUST be provided by Mind Garden staff.
This works like a regular campaign with reports and data (and for custom surveys).
No-Login Method
With this method of administering a survey, we provide a link to your campaign that you may post, which requires no login. This is perceived by participants to be the least invasive method of taking a survey, because it does not require them to provide an email identity.
The No-Login method is designed to work with single rater instruments.
- Advantage: Ease and convenience for your participants to take the survey, and with complete anonymity
- Advantage: Participants use one of your purchased licenses when they open the survey. Licenses without associated data are recycled after one day.
- Disadvantage: A participant may respond to the survey multiple times (although Transform will not allow more than one survey response per browser per computer). Also, you will not know who is responding to your survey and the licenses may be used up by anyone who has the survey link. Be especially careful where you post the link because if it becomes available via internet search, your licenses may be used by unintended participants and quickly exhausted.
The link is provided by campaign, and is found on the campaign's participant tab. No login is required but a cookie is written that is associated with that browser and computer for 30 days. If a participant completes the assessment with that browser and computer, and tries to take the survey again, they will see a message that the assessment has been completed. If another browser or computer is used, it is a whole new assessment and the participant can take the survey again.
If you wish to have multiple participants take the survey on the same browser and computer, the cookie needs to be deleted to start a new survey.
Note: To provide personal reports when using the No-Login Link method requires customizations for a fee and purchase of report licenses.
Bulk Upload Method
With this method of administering a survey, you will send to Mind Garden a file containing several hundred or several thousand participant emails. Mind Garden will input these emails into Transform for you. You receive a link to email to your participants to access the survey. Participants can only gain access to your survey if their email address has been added via the bulk upload. With this method, you pay only for participants who actually login, and a license is counted whether they complete the survey or not. (Minimum purchase of 500 licenses is required.) Bulk upload is not available for multi-rater instruments like the MLQ.
Key-in Method
For customers who want to take advantage of our online scoring (raw scale scores by respondent), but whose respondents use paper and pencil surveys, we allow the key-in method. The customer simply creates false identities in the system and proceeds through the survey one respondent at a time. Data can be downloaded at any time.
Purchase Transform™ Survey Hosting for this method. For customers who have already purchased License to Reproduce, we can invoice you for the difference.
Method for administering multi-rater surveys
Email-specific Invitations
With this method of administration, you import Participant email addresses (and names or unique identifiers) into Transform. After clicking Import and then OK, Transform sends an email directly to the participant. The participant clicks on the invitation link and goes to the login page, enters their email address, and creates a password. From their Participant page, they follow the steps to take the self-assessment and enter the names/emails of their raters. Rater invitations will be sent immediately.
Note: we can turn on an option for you to "send to all Pending (incomplete) participants and raters" a reminder with the click of a button.
Transform™ Delivery Options
Data plus scoring
When you use Transform to administer your survey and collect data, your survey participants take the survey online (or you may choose the key-in option, where they take it via paper/pencil and you input the data later). As participants respond, the data is collected and you may download it any number of times. The data file is structured with one participant per row, including their raw data and scale scores. Note: for unanswered optional MLQ questions, the cell in the data file will be blank and the score for that scale only will not be calculated. You can manually calculate the scale score, accounting for the non-response.
Check out these Transform™ brochures and information sheets:
Welcome to Transform™ by Mind Garden (brochure)
Transform Your Organization with Mind Garden (brochure)
How To Get Started With Transform™ For Participants (information sheet)
Why Transform™?
Transform™ is a human assessment system that creates a unique identity for your participants. This means you can do self-assessment and assessment of the same person over time or across many instruments. Some instruments are multi-rater where the person can assess themselves and others can rate them. A participant can even rate their social environment. Since each person has an identity, all data you collect from or about a person stays linked to that person. You may even want to enter external criterion data or collect demographics from them.
The design of the Mind Garden Transform™ assessment system comes from the research method practiced at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at University of California at Berkeley (now the Institute of Personality and Social Research). The design creates an enduring identity for each participant across all assessments and data.
Having a wealth of information associated with a person is a powerful tool for research and psychological instrument development. The Transform system can link together self ratings, observer ratings, and environmental assessment across multiple instruments and over time.
A characterization of research with the IPAR model can be found in the book Portraits of Type: An MBTI Research Compendium by Avril Thorne and Harrison Gough (CAPT, 1999):
"The Nature of the Assessments
"Each member of a sample was seen in intensive one- to three-day assessments at the Institute. … Typically, 15 to 18 observers studied the assessees at the Institute in groups of 10. The assessees were interviewed two or three times, were asked to take a wide assortment of cognitive, interest, and personality tests, and were observed by the staff in a variety of situations such as leaderless group discussions, role-plays, and meals. On the basis of these observations, but without knowledge of any of the test scores, staff members independently assigned trait rating, Q-sort formulations, and adjectival descriptions to each individual. These observations, or O-data, provide a rich fund of information that can be used to help clarify and define the meaning of self-report measures of personality such as the MBTI"(p. 5-6).
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